There’s 40-50 hostile Tech 3’s with support in warp to our position. Our fleet? A dozen sentry neuting Geddons and a mix of Guardians, a few Command Ships and some scattered misc. Total numbers for us? 40.

The wormhole is not ours. The tower we’re attacking is alien to us. The fleet we’re in? It’s full of people we’ve never flown with. Our target callers? ST and myself. What’s at stake? A good fight. The primary aim is to bait out the hostile fleet to judge a response on a secondary fleet for the next day to finish the tower. We’ve done that. Objective achieved.

The next objective is to survive.

But perhaps I start us in a bit late, for much has occurred prior. Let’s step back and take a deep breath.

The day begins well. Mick found a Proteus uncloaked in our C4a static and… shot it. It never shot back. This is followed by a small fleet materializing, so we form a counter fleet. After some scanning and probing, their fleet warps out the safespot we located – meaning we merely nail a Prophecy.

A few minutes later, myself and Mick get an EVE-Mail.

It’s from an NPC character and links to a Twitch TV stream of… the fleet we just tried to kill. It’s a feed of their buzzard from inside our home wormhole. They have all of us watchlisted and handily available on their screen. I test the delay on the stream by logging my alt back in and, lo and behold, their stream has no delay. Awesome.

We put it to the side for now, for something IMPORTANT has arisen. Our public channel is flaring and it’s Elroy Skimms looking for a chat. More specifically, he’s looking for assistance. His alliance is seiging a C2 Russian corp and the locals have batphoned in every Russian within 100 jumps. 40 Tech 3s have been confirmed entering the wormhole. The tower exits reinforced in an hour.

“We don’t plan to win” Elroy says, “we plan to get them to show their full force before we bring in our own allies tomorrows and are looking for volunteers to die with us”. Way to rally the troops, Elroy, but WHEN shall assist you.

Myself, Mick and ST grab our ships and make haste through high-sec to their location. On the way we acquire some extra pilots; House2Twist, Xenos and some mixed RvB pilots heed our call. Whilst 6 of the 10 or so RvB are in frigates, any help beats no help.

The Volunteer fleet assembles in k-space

The alliance we’re assisting is Ocularis Inferno. They have about 20-25 pilots in the wormhole with various Armageddons and Guardians and are awaiting our fleet. A comms mishap means the primary mumble server is out and we swap to Teamspeak with no further issues.

The volunteer fleet is assembled in kspace and the Ocularis fleet in wspace, time to link up. We fleetwarp to the wormhole, jump in, and warp to the staging tower. ST is assigned as primary target caller, with myself as secondary.

The fleet, ready for action.

The enemy have a couple of Logi out repping the tower but not much else. No time for a drink or a nap, it’s time to start. Leaving the safety of the forcefield behind, it’s out into hell we go. “To those about to die, we salute you” is the only comment in teamspeak as we enter warp.

Landing on an Osprey nails us a single kill but the remaining ships are back into their shields with no issues. The Battleships drop sentries and start shooting the tower.

The Russians have arrived. Sentry drones are recalled. Heavies and mediums are deployed in their stead. Capchain is ready. Comms are quiet, for once. The fleet awaits with bated breath.

My overview lights up as a dozen or so targets land 10km off our side, lead by a Loki, We engage the Loki as the overview continues to fill, taking it out quickly.

A clash of fleets. A game of moons.

Enemy logi lands, as does a mass of T3s. Neuts and damps go onto the enemy logi, but jams and ecm drones go onto ours. The fight spirals into chaos as our battleships buckle under the enemy DPS, our 4 Logi thrown into disarray by the jams. Not to be deterred, our dps combines onto a Legion. I train my lasers on two hostile Falcons, but both warp in low structure. A third evades my fire and disrupts our Guardian chain yet again, losing us a couple more battleships. In retaliation, an Ishtar goes down next. Take that.

The battle in full swing, but our Batteship backbone is crumbling

With our Geddons falling fast, our pressure on the hostile Guardians is greatly reduced and enemy repairs are getting hard to counter. ST does a great job swapping targets as he can, but our DPS is too little for the fleet we face. Nevertheless, a Proteus goes down followed by a Hurricane.

Unfortunately, we’re now in a heap of trouble.

Exhibit A: We cannot break the armour ECM tengu. Nor anything else.

Our dying act is to kill another Ishtar before we bail what we can, the fleet’s wrecks scattered across space. I, of course, die among them.

We say thanks to our hosts and the other volunteers and limp back to our home wormhole chain.

Back in the chain, Firefly is trying to kill the Twitch streamer. The guy is still broadcasting. We know he’s in a cloaked buzzard 75km from our wormhle, but all our orbiting doesn’t decloak him. He’s also still active, manually evading us. Surely he’s figured out we’re watching his public stream?

We finally grab a pair of Interceptors and go for him. As we orbit the wormhole and play a game of “hot-cold”, he finally makes a fatal error. He warps to a bookmark called “c4”. There’s only one C4 wormhole, so we follow. We miss the distance, but I land 30km away according to his stream. Finally, he realises his folly and disables his stream.

Not before warping to the Sun at 100km. I land and decloak him easily.

A massive thanks to those in Ocularis Inferno and the other volunteers who joined us. As always, my corpmates did extremely well and a thanks to them for the various kills throughout the night. I am also sad to report the Twitch stream now needs a password to access…

I’m also glad to report our recruitment drive is a success with several new recruits and many more trying to get in. We need a new recruit tower….

So I got a bizzare message whilst at work yesterday. Apparently our static wormhole had broken. “Broken?” I ask. “Broken how?”

Turns out it had broken quite severely, resulting in a mad chain that resulted in multiple kills & losses across several fights. How mad was this chain? How dumb were our losses? What exactly broke? Read on to find out.

The day started normally, as far as I know. Mick was casually scouting the wormhole chain through our static Class 4 (lifespan of 16 hours) and it had gone end-of-life 2 hours prior, meaning it had about 2 hours left till it died naturally. This lined up with our time of opening it, so we’re all good. Imagine Mick’s surprise when he got a message that the wormhole had collapsed behind him. Not unusual, but still uncommon. Next step was to scout the new static wormhole in our home. Easy!

So Mick scanned the new wormhole (which has a E175 signature) and jumped to the new Class 4 wormhole, which we designate “C4a”. Except he didn’t jump. He got stuck in traffic control followed by a constant system load. His ship in the meantime remained on the wormhole but untargetable by ourselves. The only fix was to relog which dumped you back on the wormhole on our side. Our second pilot to jump had the same problem. So our static wormhole was bugged and we were unable to scout ahead. Fortunately, another wormhole has appeared! It’s another E175. A rarity, but technically possible, so C4b was born. We managed to jump into this one with no issue.

Whilst scouting this, yet another wormhole appeared in our home. It’s… a E175. C4c is the new designation.

Another wormhole appears. E175. C4d.

C4e shows up.

C4f.

C4g followed shortly after. Ohgod. Help.

Each wormhole multiplies and expands as if it were a normal chain, but there just happens to be 6 of them. Probe after probe is launched by my fellow Engineers as we look for fights and glory. A C3 opens into home as well, leading us backwards as well as forwards. before long, it looked a bit like this:

Click to make-big.

The eagle eyed amongst you will notice a wormhole at the bottom right named “we died here”. We did.

Whilst scanning, Mick ran into some difficulties. By “some difficulties” I actually mean “several bombers tackling his Tengu in C5t” so we did what we do and launched our 3 scanning Proteus down his chain to help. A hostile Arazu is here as well so we quickly establish tackle on the remaining ships. The bombers either die or flee but are replaced by a Talos, Drake and Scythe. The Drake jumps away as we engage the others.

Ed is, as usual, providing key intel in our chat channel

So far so good. The Arazu is slowly breaking and the Talos is taking a fair pounding. The Scythe and Talos jump away and we try to finish the Arazu. The plan works right up until a Blackbird comes through the wormhole and jams me out, allowing the Arazu to move away and jump through the wormhole. We chase through to C5t.

It’s a Class 5 Pulsar wormhole, providing a massive boost to shields and a reduction in armour resistances. The enemy now have a Shield-Talos, Drake, Blackbird and Omen Navy Issue on grid. We have 3 armour Proteus and a heavily damaged Tengu which goes down fast due to polarisation. My Falcon on my alt comes in to support as one of our Proteus bails back through the wormhole. We break the Talos to structure but a Scimitar lands and starts getting repairs in. Whilst we try to kill the Scimitar, a bomber has decloaked and killed my over-worked Falcon. A Dominix lands and we finally choose to bail, with both our remaining Proteus evading the enemy gang successfully. In the meantime, we have reinforcements in the shape of a Sleipnir but a mistake is made and he warps to the very hostile wormhole rather than waiting for the main reinforcements which are burning down the chain and dies extremely quickly.

Meanwhile, my Proteus is stuck in their wormhole. I jump through to the C3x in an attempt to escape but I decloak too close to the wormhole and am caught by their Blackbird. Our gang is now 2 jumps away. I have to tank 2 Drakes, a Blackbird (which jams me) a Dominix (which neuts me so hard my damage control turns off) and a pair of bombers. I could jump back, but the wormhole halved some time ago and must be low on mass and I’d rather avoid being stuck, so I stay and I cycle as many tank mods as possible when the cap allows it.

Help arrives as my armour dips towards 30%. 2 Absolutions and 2 Guardians land on field. The hostile fleet now realises they are outgunned, if not outmanned, and jump through the wormhole. One of our Absos follows. The wormhole collapses behind them so we lost the brave Abso on the other side.

So that was fight number one in the crazy chain of doom. It went badly. Shit happens.

We now need new ships. How lucky we have access to a billion wormholes to buy some. We head out through C4g to buy them where my alt’s pod passes a couple of Ravens on scan at a tower that were most certainly not there 30 minutes ago. They could be site running shortly, so ST moves a Proteus down the chain to watch them – only to run smack into them on the wormhole.

Tackle is called and reinforcements are sent from our home system. The Ravens are not equipped for the job at hand and try crossjumping the wormhole to escape but we have people on both sides. Once polarised and prevented from jumping, they are quickly bubbled and killed.

An hour later another Tengu of ours finds himself polarised and tackled on a highsec wormhole by a Devoter, Enyo and Gnosis. Fortunately he jumps away to safety in low structure and we’re on our way with a fleet. We pile up on the connecting wormhole with 2 Guardians, an Abso and a Myrmidon. The Myrm goes in as bait and kills an Enyo and Talwar. Sadly, he forgets to tell us to jump in and repair him and dies to a bomber as well as the Gnosis and Devoter. Whoops. By the time the rest of us land the enemy simply jump out leaving us a bit red faced!

Saturday night led me to making a bad decision. Again. I decided to lead another Ganked roam.

Whoops.

The theme for the night was interceptors and fast frigates (before the awesome Rubicon patch hits next month). Some 140 suicidal decided that I was worth following and into low we went. Our first kill of the night is a Stabber Fleet issue trying to run ahead of us in lowsec. For some reason, we were faster. Who’d have thunk it?

We are the swarm

Into Nullsec we went., our speed allowing us to traverse systems extremely quickly. It’s a good thing we could because Great Wildlands was devoid of any wildlife. Not a soul came out to play so we bounced into Curse. We lost a few ships to bombers so made a bee-line for the market system of Hemin.

However in our haste, The Initiative had decided that Speed was Bad and had come to put a stop to our MWD’ing ways by launching a Zealot & Guardian fleet at us. Hiding on the other side of a stargate, they set up camp. We had no choice but to engage like men.

So we fly straight into the Zealot gang, guns blazing. We quickly realise we cannot break the Zealots so melt the Guardians. All 5 of them. At which point the Zealots run away faster than I thought cruisers could move. Go figure. Regardless, we lose a few frigates and a Cynabal in exchange for wiping their logi. A good fight! Battle Report.

We proceed to Hemin, dancing around bombers and jumping to side systems to try to grab ratters. As we reach Hemin, a large gang flares the stargate behind us. A logi-supported Eagle gang belonging to Tactical Narcotics have jumped in and engaging our stragglers. We bounce everyone back on grid and quickly take their bubblers off field. We try for their Scimitars and Eagles but their reps are too much so we engage their T1 logi instead, followed by all their Recons. With those down, we start to slowly break the Scimitars but local just spiked. A Vexor gang of an alliance friendly to Tactical have warped in! Whilst we lost about a dozen frigs against the Eagle gang, w won’t survive against Vexors at close range for long so we bail out within seconds. Battle Report.

Next up we moved to the other end of Curse and managed to run into the same Vexor gang. A standoff ensued across a system before we came in to engage, only for the Vexors to run as we burned towards them. We did catch a few, however!

More bomb dodging ensued as we moved to HED-GP to find a whole lot of nothing. Many people chose to leave here due to the late hour, so we proceeded into Providence with 60 pilots remaining. Provi residents were quick to forum up a logi supported gang to counter us. Knowing this was our final fight we launched into it with everything we had. We managed to kill 2 of their Basilisks before we had to bail and/or die.

So overall? A really good roam! Roll on Rubicon and this theme will be insane!

Mike Shaw did a video of the roam, so here is that;

Prizes are a mix of names I remembered and various killboard warriors;

Last night, the lowsec system of Asakai played host to another fight. This one did not involve Titans, incorrect jumps and swarms of capitals. This one was intentional – a Free For All organised by Xander Phoena of the Crossing Zebra podcast. The idea was a community FFA – we expected a fair few podcasters/bloggers/CSM to show up.

The night started well as we formed a temporary fleet before the start-time of 2000 to break open a camp on the inbound highsec gate. Of course, the FC was Mangala Solaris who sent me through as bait tackle. In an incursus. Whilst they had a blackbird.

The rest of our gang followed and broke up the camp by which time it was 2000. We jumped over to Asakai, warped to the Sun and started the fun. CSM members Mangala and Ali showed, with ex-member Two Step appearing too. Bloggers like myself, Mark of EVE Travel and more also graced the field. Truly it would be a battle of massive proportions.

Tradition dictates we shoot the organiser first

The brawl kicked off quickly, with ships dying left and right. Despite my ELITE PILOTING SKILLS my venture finally died after about 15 minutes, resulting in my pod being smartbombed to structure on the way back to highsec.

How to not smartbomb 101. Step 1: Fail to actually kill your target.

3 Smartbombing BS were killing our reshippers so we fleeted up again to take them out. I had the best squad.

Hello to Bagehi, Mark, Rhavas and Sindel \o/

As expected, the smartbombers warped off with the exception of one which ran into highsec. He died so we went back to Asakai, where a couple of small fleets have shown up – namely a Hawk gang and a Talwar gang. As a result, we swapped the fight to a Caldari Small Stronghold and started fighting all over both the in-gate and the site itself. Amusingly, people seemed to forget my Venture has build in warp core strength, resulting in me warping out of gangs and death several times. I even landed on a stargate, aggressed, with a full 30 man AHAC gang on it. Everything locked me and points went up from 2 of them. So I warped away. So it goes.

The fights continued for 4 hours. The entire thing was, quite frankly, excellent fun. Here’s a whole bunch of screenshots.

Death to CSM members!

Death to sniping Corms

Death to this random Rifter

Death to Two Step

Death to Two Step the Sequel

Death to Two Step the Trilogy

Seriously. Death to Two Step!

So we have my killboard of the event, which only shows a small proportion of the fights that occurred. I am also uploading a short 20-minute video of a portion of it. Not edited/made pretty – just 20 minutes of Fraps and comms. This should appear -HERE- in about an hour, so check back later!

Many hanks to Xander and everyone else who attended. It was a really fun night!

So in the absence of much else going on, here’s a small report from when we engaged Kill It With Fire the other day.

A C5 wormhole has opened into our wormhole, spewing some scouts from an unknown Corp into our home. Fortunately our resident elite frigate pilot Barrak is on the case. Turns out a Kill It With Fire Dramiel is buzzing about the wormhole so Barrak engages it in kind, netting a 260mill ISK Dramiel kill.

Kill do not appear happy with this arrangement and show up with a few ships on the wormhole – a couple T3s and some Battlecruisers. We know they’ll have backup and we don’t really want their fleet jumping us later so we drop our own fleet with an Archon in tow onto the wormhole, engaging them on the far side.

As expected, a couple of Guardians, some HACs and more T3s show up to engage. I throw my Absolution and Scorpion into the fight. Jamming out one Guardian, we quickly dispatch the other. The Archon has forgotten to lock my Absolution so I am forced to have him retreat in structure as I get primaried. We get a Proteus to low armour but he evades us by jumping and managing to evade on our side of the wormhole. My scorpion, still in the fight, is now scycling jams randomly on the remaining Guardian before swapping to two Oracles which have shown up. The remaining hostile ships start retreating whilst we hold onto the Deimos and remaining Guardian.

We finish off the Guardian and Deimos and head home, rolling the wormhole behind us as intended.